Just watched Tom DiCillo’s documentary When You’re Strange.
Dionysos is a tough patron, and he leaves you, as the cowboys would say, “Rode hard and put up wet.”
Or dead.
But no one ever uses your music to sell cars.
Tag Archives: movies
The Wicker Conspiracy
Everyone’s favorite Pagan-themed movie of the 1970s turns up on a list of “15 conspiracy movies that don’t fall apart at the end.”
(Via Ann Althouse.)
Upcoming Movies with Pagan Themes
Or as one commenter puts it about the new Red Riding Hood, “zeroing in on the symbolism and completely missing the point.”
The Anatomy of Diesel Punk
For when you are tired of the fussiness of steam punk—diesel punk explained:
Generally, dieselpunk can take inspiration from ’20s German Expressionist films, film noir, 1930s pulp magazines and radio dramas, crime and wartime comics, period propaganda films and newsreels, wartime pinups, and other entertainment of the early 20th century. As this covers a broad spectrum, the precise sources of inspiration can vary greatly between dieselpunk works. Like Steam Punk, Dieselpunk is a genre dictated primarily by its aesthetics rather than by its thematic content. Both grime and glamour have their place in dieselpunk.
Now I learn that one of my Favorite Movies of All Time is diesel punk:
• the 1995 film adaptation
of Shakespeare’s Richard III, set in 1930s Britain (coupling Diesel Dystopia with Putting On The Reich and ShoutOuts to 1984)
Click through to YouTube trailer. When I saw the ticker tape machine in the opening sequence (not part of this YouTube clip), I was gone.
Famous Archaeologists Who Fail
They are all fictional, of course.
Actually, in my experience, archaeologists are indeed a vicious bunch, but they usually eschew large-caliber revolvers and bullwhips.
(Tip of the stained fedora to Caroline of Necropolis Now.)
An Icelandic Pocahantas?
In 1998, the Icelandic parliament passed a bill authorizing creation of a database of all citizens’ genetic, genealogical, and medical records, sometimes called The Book of Icelanders.
Now, reports National Geographic, researchers have found traces of possible American Indian ancestry in some Icelanders. They hypothesize that some of the explorers or settlers in Vinland might have brought back a woman, or women, from a North American tribe.
Fascinating. Next they will be telling us that Severed Ways is a documentary.
It’s still not as weird as the legend that some western Chinese are descended from Roman soldiers.
Agora: It’s a Riot
I finally watched Agora on DVD last night. It’s one rioting mob after another interspersed with astronomy lessons.
You have your Pagan mob, your Jewish mob, your Christian mob(s). A Muslim mob would have fit right in, but had not yet been invented.
And did Hypatia really discover that planetary orbits were elliptical, not perfect Platonic circles? No. It was the sort of issue that would have engaged her interest, however.
Here is the historical part: There was a Pagan neoplatonic philosopher-teacher in 5th-century Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of an intellectual father, who was murdered by a sort of Christian Taliban.
There was a Roman prefect (governor) named Orestes and a fanatical monk named Ammonius. And Mullah Bishop Cyril, of course.
And the rest is movie-making. (Military historians will note that the Roman soldiers look more like the 1st century CE than the 5th.) For more on the actual Hyptia—and on the movie version—visit Egregores.
UPDATE: See also Kallisti’s review with its “motivational poster.“
The Horror! The Horror!
At The Witching Hour, Peg surveys some lists of best Halloween films.
For pagan-themed horror films, or those including witches, at any rate, you can’t beat The Wicker Man, The Craft, Practical Magic (Griffin Dunne, 1998), The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1968), and The Dunwich Horror (Daniel Haller, 1970).
I would not exactly call Rosemary’s Baby Pagan-with-a-capital-P, but it is still wonderfully chilling as it moves from innocence to realization.
And what about The Call of Cthulhu?
Veronica Lake for Halloween
The Australian blog Sexy Witch has featured some promotional materials from the 1942 movie I Married a Witch lately.
It starred Veronica Lake, who filled the “perky petite blonde” slot in several “screwball comedies” of the 1940s, together with banker-turned-actor Fredric March as the descendant of her 17th-century persecutor. Internet Movie Database has more about it.
I saw it years ago, was thinking along the lines of “Let’s rent it for Halloween,” and discovered that Netflix does not have it.
Apparently I rented it in the 1990s from another mail-order video-rental company that no longer exists, but which had a large library of off-beat, foreign, vintage, and “art” movies.
So we will watch Sullivan’s Travels instead.
UPDATE: “Why You Should Watch Classic Films.”
A Movie That Takes Dreaming Seriously
The best part about watching movies in the little mountain town is that after driving the four-block length of Main Street, we enter the darkness, winding through hills and a long canyon, then a mile of gravel road, and then home.
It lets the movie’s spell slowly fade, which is helpful after watching Inception.
(The second-best thing is that the little theatre’s sound-system does not rattle your fillings, unlike a typical Tinseltown movie box.)
In the game of describing movies in terms of other movies, I thought of a hyperdimensional Flatliners with the Gnostic overtones of The Matrix and a faint, faint whiff of Lost Horizon.
Anne Hill, who has better access than I to first-run movies, blogged about Inception last month.
Today [unlike the ancients], we say that we “had” a dream, and believe that dreams come from within us, like a cough, a bad mood, or a stirring in our souls. We worry that dreams reveal something disturbed in our psychological makeup, or we try to explain them away by saying they are just random brain activity. “Inception’s” success as a thriller stems in part from turning the tables on our “scientific” understanding of dreams, and bringing back the more archaic fear of dream-meddling from without.
She links to Robert Waggoner, who writes on lucid dreaming—read his post, “Ten Things I Like about Inception.”
If you step outside of Plato’s physical cave and stumble into Plato’s lucid dream cave, who’s to know?
I still think that not enough teaching about the Craft talks about dreaming and its power. Even though Inception is mostly about corporate espionage, exploding cars, shoot-outs, and derring-do, I admire a movie that takes the dreaming world(s) seriously as realms that interact with this one.
Do you know if you are dreaming right now?